The Moth on the Mountain
by TheRedRoster
Summary: Neptune dreads the eternity that comes. Dreads the staunch romances that grow heavy and numerous after every lifetime, only to be forgotten as if fleeting. But by the end of it all, he finds his way to her. Weiss, the moth on the mountain, serenading the moon with him, her captive audience.


_There is a moth on the mountain, her mandibles and teeth chitter-chatter that ignorable song that serenades the moon and decorates the night._

My name is Neptune. I was once a farmer who tended this valley over a millennium ago. My fields have run dry since, and my fear of open water made reviving the crops difficult, _impossible_. Even now as my hands pluck riverside flowers does my heart stop at the sound of the river rapids that fills the air and drowns my senses. With the tiny buds in my hands, I retreat back to the dry road and rush headlong into the distance, away from the water, from the _noise_… that sound of some errant gurgling, choking close to my ear but bisected by the memory of a song that dams the flood.

Rough fingers run along the neck of the flowers – fragile and unremarkable as they are – and my thoughts linger to the Moth of the Mountain. I eye the peak from my spot on the road; the mountain run flush with skin of green, sleeved in forest until it is naked at the top, where a temple looms over the valley like the ancient sentinel it has ever been.

At the foot of the mountain, I stop at the torii gate that sits at the toe of a thousand steps. The red archway is normally an unwelcome sight, but that is only because of the guards that were supposed to man it.

Resting against one pillar is the billhook halberd one of the guards usually wields. My eyes follow passed it into the woods where I can see the ruffling of silk dirtying as it slams against the tree and unsettles the dust. A mock of ginger hair bobs against the tree as the sheen of thick-rimmed glasses pivots back and forth into it. Perry and Deery had trouble tolerating each other all of last year, but nowadays they busy themselves this way.

I press on and wonder if they are romantics or simply… _carnal_.

The haze in my mind recalls the scent of some woman against the salty sea breeze. Wild orange hair with teal hung over her eyes. I remember her laugh and an energy off her that electrifies… _awakens_. Like coffee on late nights, blinking away dreariness even as the world turns to sleep and you stare into the heated cup and bask in the warmth that sinks into your cheeks. Her kiss is felt against my lower lip where a heated night's climax caused her to bite hard enough to scar. I remember the profuse apologies, the panic, and the wetness of my kiss that silenced her.

I don't remember how she died.

Hers is the only conquest I can recall. Neon Katt, thirty-two, at a pier in Vacuo. The handful of others – each a century apart – are blurbs flitting through burdensome recollection. Did I love them? What were their names? Did I marry? Have children? Was I still a farmer? What were my aspirations? Why did I want her? All questions with answers lost to time.

Perhaps they are somewhere there in the ruins of past lives, buried beneath the myriad synapses in my mind, but they are left so deep in a brain that cannot decay and continues to expand that all I can fathom from those depths is that there is _so much of it_… and so it is overlarge, pressurized painfully against the walls of my skull.

Halfway up the steps there is an old box stall where a tiny old woman hides in the shadow of her thick tarpaulin awning.

She beckons to me.

Hesitance mars my footing, but I find myself approaching nonetheless. I make to sit where there is no chair, but I find myself sitting in one anyway. She smiles at me from the darkness, her curved teeth gleaming white like pearls in the murky ocean.

I test the seat I'm sitting in. She conjures a different one every time I come up here. It's a wooden stool this time.

"You shared coffee at the counter," she says. "The third date at a bistro. She preferred the pier you found her at. A shame you could never top it."

"I got lucky," I say without knowing why. Sometimes when I speak, my mouth runs on its own and remembers things I normally don't. "She was going through a break-up the week before and somehow pulling her from that made it…"

"…_Magical_?"

"Was that what she called it?" _Is that what I called it?_

"Neither. That was her friends, dear."

I blink, sparing a breath's length to remember. Neon's is the only face I see against the backdrop of a lit Ferris Wheel, smiling at me until her glow-in-the-dark bracelets fade dimly against a haunted house window. I hear voices in the distance – people she knows, _her friends_ perhaps – but I only remember her panting as I steal another kiss at the tail end of that memory. No one and nothing else manifests or matters.

"Who were they?" I ask.

Her grin is Cheshire, wide and framing her round face that silhouettes barely before my adjusting eyes. "Beginning to forget already?" she asks, laughing with a rumble in her girthy throat.

"I've already forgotten."

The teeth vanish behind the slit of her lips, smiling softly, satisfied. "Then I doubt they were important to you."

The words earn my ire, a baleful anger lingering in the depths of my chest, but it clears with a harried breath. She notices and delights but I think little of her sadism. "They were all important to me," I say instead, mouth speaking for me again.

"I doubt it."

"I meant the other girls… the ones before her. How could I have forgotten them? They should have been important." I felt I might have loved them. Not for certain, but I had spent years with each of them. A different woman every hundred years… but even in the haze of my ancient mind, I still feel something for them. Even if all I can reach for a is a hazy silhouette, and a sensation pressed against my palm that once breathed life into my old heart.

"You forget why you're coming up here, boy. Those memories weren't forgotten, so much as they were taken away."

I pause. "What…? How?"

She ignores the question and busies herself with something behind the counter. I hear the click-clacking of a machine pushing out paper and the burbling of some brew. She taps the counter and points behind off to my side, at the steps.

I turn to see Perry, the bespectacled guard from before, climb the steps with harrowed breath, halberd in hand, and a loose silk robe. He had forgotten to tighten it from his escapade. "N-Neptune!" he shouts, "I've – ha! – been trying to – _fuck, haa_ – call you." He falls on one knee, leaning onto his weapon. "It's too early…"

"Is it?" I ask.

"I… I don't know, b-but just wait till tonight for me, will ya? If she sings at twilight, I'll go back and let you go."

I look down the steps and worry myself for some reason. My heart sinks into my stomach and I think myself upset for Deery and… _mad_ at Perry. "Don't leave her alone down there," I tell him sternly, "especially not at nightfall."

My eyes narrow when he makes to argue. He shrinks under my gaze and he hurries along, back down the steps but threatening to stumble.

"Didn't think you'd be so fatherly this time around," the old woman says, swaying from side-to-side as she chuckles at me expectantly.

"I protected them till they could protect themselves. If they couldn't take care of each other, then I would have failed as an older brother," my mouth says.

"You were never so hard on Sun."

"He never needed my protection. He was only a year younger than me. Sometimes… sometimes I needed _his_." _Who was Sun?_

"He was that older boy at the orphanage, always taking care of the younger scamps, he did," she said as if reading my thoughts.

A memory fizzles into my mind. I'm staring out a window where I can see a pier in the distance. An amalgam of dancing colors decorates a carnival that blooms beneath the flash of fireworks. I marvel at how the blast of colors swallow the darkness and mingle with the stars, my twelve-year-old heart brimming with excitement.

There is a boy beside me, blonde hair and a vibrant smile that matches his namesake. He tells me he'll take a girl there one day and propose in front of the Ferris Wheel. Then he'll buy the orphanage and be everyone's dad. I wish him luck before I go home to my family, wishing every day I could just make him my brother.

I lean over the counter, my hands gripping it firmly as I bring myself back to the present.

From my position the old woman's warm breath spills over my neck, stagnating as she chuckles. Her eyes are staring blankly at me, not at all matching her smile. Her hands lurch forward, revealing her pale blue skin, pulling tight against her bones as if it is suffocated. Nails, yellowed and long, streak light like glowing amber as her fingers twitch to grab me.

In a panic I smack her face as I push myself to sit back. She laughs again as her hair falls off and her ceramic mask clatters to the floor.

Her two eyes are facsimile, hiding beneath the veneer of a kindly old woman. Her true eye is a single wide saucer of deep silver, an orb jutting from her round face like a rising moon peeling off the distant hill it shadows. She is a demon, an _oni_ – she specified when I asked.

She wasn't always here. Not in every life.

She'd come after my first few visits up the mountain, and I'd stopped to see her every time despite the ambiguous hospitality. I could never, especially now, decide if she was a welcome stop or not, but I arrive all the same, seat myself within her reach, and speak things I don't remember.

Her large silver eye blinks at me, and it seems to alight the dark stall as the protruding orb pulls forward with a stretched meaty sound, threatening to pop out of its socket. The eye twitches, every turn and roll squelching against the wet lids, as if attempting to see all of me at once whilst trying to wiggle out of her head.

Her eye shuts.

I open mine.

I'm standing at the steps and her stall is gone. I continue my ascent, eying the sun that dips slowly behind the temple above, casting long shadows against the trees.

"_How many times have you been here_?" I hear the old woman ask in my mind.

"I don't remember," my mouth says.

"_Have you counted the steps, boy_?" she asks me.

"There are too many," I say.

"Hm… You've lived each one. I suppose there _are_ too many."

I feel no pain when I reach the top, my legs straining against nothing, my breath even and stilled, but it hitches when twilight falls over the mountain before it transcends into night, and I hear the chittering in the air. It is the fringed echo of the Moth, the chirp that is only heard in the distance, descending the mountain and filling the valley with its droning.

Yet, here, where the Moth finds her stage, you can hear the song for what it is, where the chittering of her mandibles against her teeth are only a fraction of her performance.

_There is a moth on the mountain, and her song serenades the moon_. That is what the people say. The villages and the White Fang, the Huntsmen and the men in pressed suits but her song was never for the moon.

For the moon served only as her spotlight.

The Moth lounges inside of her temple, singing as the moonlight pours over her in the inner garden. Through the open doors I can see her even from this distance, her pale white skin, her furred neck, and the antennae bobbing and vibrating with every held note.

I dare not approach, seating myself at the porch as I listen.

The temple was still old when I was young. Perhaps it was always here. Perhaps so was she, calling me to the summit, to find her.

Her footsteps behind me stifle a breath. I hadn't noticed that she stopped singing.

"You're here… _again_," she says with a deadpan.

"I wanted to see you," I answer easily.

She flops next to me on my right and squints. "Why?" she asks with a glare.

Her skin is pale underneath the carapace that hides her womanly features, flush white like silk and her fingers feel much the same when I reach for it, touching the tips ever-so-slightly. Her neck is rimmed with what looks like fur, cradling her small face and tiny – currently pouting – mouth. Her eyes are pupil-less and glass-like, with something white sunken beneath the surface that blinks up at me.

"You're easy on the eyes," I say. "Not like the valley or the city… not like the pier or the ocean."

She is silent after she sighs, and I already miss her singing. She looks elsewhere and is somewhere in her own thoughts.

I feel bold and take her hand. Her fingers stiffen under mine but stirs no further, even when I weave them together. "Dolt…" she whispers.

"Did you miss me?" I ask as I lean in, her scent like a sprinkling of incense and a touch of lavender wafting through my senses.

"Don't… don't make me say it."

"Hey, I brought you–" The flowers are gone. I don't even remember having brought them up. "Sorry, I think–" I turn to find that she's already holding them in her other hand, admiring the white petals and yellow center.

"Thank you," she says. "They're simple. Normal. I like that." Her smile is small and polite, but it masks the sadness in her eyes that tilts her lip back down. I feel her apology and rest my forehead to hers. She need not say it. I've heard it enough before.

"Neptune…" she says, hesitant to say more.

"Weiss…" Her name is wine across my lips, lingering in my throat.

She reaches over to touch her other hand to my arm. "Before… before we do this, what… what was her name?"

"Neon. Neon Katt." I languish in the name, bask in it for as long as I can and with as much of her as I can remember. "Her character was… _contagious_. Her mirth, her vigor, everything."

"Even her love?" There is a longing in her glassy eyes as she stares up at me, and I hate that it saddens her.

"Yes but… that was only for me." _Did I love her back?_

I perish the thought and rest my head on Weiss's lap.

"This is your left ear…" she says.

"It's okay, I'm used to the sound by now."

Her fingers are warm against the skin of my cheek, her index finger trailing along it as it brushes the rim of my ear. She doesn't ask if I'm ready. I'm here after all.

The finger plunges into my ear and I already feel it scratching against the roof of my skull. My face locks up as if struggling against paralysis, features tensing as I feel her digging into my brain. It is painful, physically and emotionally, as thoughts once cherished vanish into a void. The woman's name is lost to me now, the fireworks and the Ferris Wheel, every heated breath and the scar on my lip.

I groan haggard noises as the finger twists and digs, and despite the pain of the lobotomy, it eases the throbbing in my brain as it shrinks, retreating from the walls of my skull. The relief is palpable when Weiss pulls away from my ear and caresses my cheek.

I fall asleep in her arms.

❊( )❊

It isn't morning when I wake, eying her from my perch on her lap. Sometimes it feels like night is eternal when I'm with her, the moon looming in the same place to service her form in its iridescence – she its muse, and it her stage.

"How do you feel?" she asks, hand running through my locks, peeling away the sweat that dries at her silken touch.

I admire the weightlessness of my skull, the pressure gone, and the sensation of that relief is almost alien. "I had forgotten what relief like this felt like."

"You say that every time."

"Do I?"

"I can't remember. I only feel that it might be true." Her memories are fragmented, but not like mine. Mine is the dry riverbed, cracked and ever infertile. My memories lost in the gaps that swallows seeds and harrows barren earth. Hers is the cracks on glass that can be melted back to seal the seams but the shape is never the same when it is healed. She remembers only what might be, disavowed from certainty to any truth.

I reach up and caress her cheek. I remember each time I have done this; for every night she allows me to stay with her. I chance for her affection, beckon it to find me. She allows the touch, letting it linger as she shuts her eyes and hums at the gentle brush – her antennae twitching.

I hesitate, however, pulling her away from the ministrations long enough to remember where we are. She pulls away just enough so my hand retreats. Sadness is in her eyes, shading the glass-like surface with a murky blue.

I wish to embolden her senses, wish to press on for more from her, but something in the back of my mind tells me not to.

"I would like to go to the garden," she tells me. "Would you dare to join me?" Her words are chosen carefully as she seems to challenge me with the offer.

"_I… can't_," are the words I wish to say.

"Yes," my mouth says instead.

My hand finds hers when she tugs me into her temple where swathes of moonlight cast through paper windows, alighting her in interims in the murky passage. The distant garden, however, is always in the light, and I fear its encroach as the sounds of running water passing through its inset river taunts me.

Weiss's back flexes when I make to pull away. She allows none of it, the carapace plates beneath her long, gown-like wings turning rigid when her muscles tug me along. Yet, as I squeeze the tense palm struggling to hold my own, I find that there is no real strength from her. She is as fragile as melting snow slipping through your fingers, but I follow all the same. My own strength fails at her behest.

At the garden, she leads me to a round cushion where she seats herself and calls out to me. I don't sit with her. Instead I watch the river that cuts through the garden, ignoring the plain flowers that rim it – ones I have gathered over the centuries – and even forgetting that she is even there.

Because the rivers calls the _noise_.

The sound of gurgling and _choking_ is all that fills my senses as the water rushes mere inches away from the tips of my feet, my fingers tensing at something haunting the rough spun torments that coil into the recesses of my mind.

I realize that the choking is mine as water fills my vision and I am drowning in a vast ocean, breath trapped in my mouth threatening to break through my weakening, frozen lips. Above me, I see bubbles float upwards to the surface, fragments of my failing breath escaping.

I try to swim upwards, recalling techniques I was taught and observations I've seen, but none of them aid me. I fail the execution so I sink, then I struggle as I frantically try to push upwards but the descent strengthens as I lose my nerve. Panic forces my mouth open as I scream wordlessly into the saltwater abyss. I feel it flood into my ears and into my mouth, leaving the thrumming in my head to fill the silence that marks the end of my life, punctuated by my fading vision and the compression tightening over my skull.

A dam breaks somewhere, water rushing through the crack that only widens, and it takes me a minute to realize that it's my right ear that's flooding. Going numb. Deaf.

I hear a song, one familiar and alluring, pulling me from the ocean, the saltwater, and the _noise_.

I open my eyes to find that I'm leaning on Weiss's shoulder, back at the garden and on the cushion she shares with me. I allow myself to be lost in her serenade – meant for me, her captive audience. Her hand is gentle as it brushes against my cheek over and over again, lingering at the shape of my jaw.

I looked up to see her tears, worrying for me. She blinks them away when she sees me staring up at her.

When the song finishes, I hear only the thrum of her heart and not the river.

She wants to apologize but I lean in, my forehead to hers. Her mandibles chitter and her antennae twitch nervously, especially when I meet her eyes with my own. There is a haze about me when I tilt my head and meet her lips.

It is our first kiss, and – for that night – would be the only one outside of her bed.

❊( )❊

I awake again at her bedside come the early morning where the sun isn't quite up yet. Her form beside me – naked and vulnerable – groans and purrs with her mandibles as she snuggles up to my waist. I peel myself off of her but not before I kiss her forehead. She groans in protest at my affection, even in her sleep she's embarrassed.

My feet plod along her wooden floors of the hallway, whilst my hands grasp at the walls hidden in the dark. It is so dark, in fact, that it feels like I've wandered into a void, but the echoes of my footsteps that bounce along the halls are what ground me.

I enter our living room and kitchen, the feel of our carpet slipping comfortably around my toes. _Wait, how did I get here?_

There is an empty bottle of brandy tucked underneath the glass coffee table. I pick it up and find it spilt some onto our carpet… _great._ I opt to worry about it later and make for the kitchen pull out the chopping board and a large container. For a moment I stop to stare out the window of our high-rise apartment, watching the city stir below and… _wait, what?_

Weiss enters in her silken nightgown as she rubs her eyes, coffee beans in her other hand. "Neptune, the Lancasters won't be here for another _five hours_. Why are you cooking _now_?"

"I need to prep the meat for lunch," my mouth says. "I forgot to marinate them and if they don't sit, the sauce won't sink into the meat like I want them to." I'm already pulling out slabs of beef and cutting them with the kitchen scissors. "Y'know, you could have just stayed in bed."

She plops onto the sofa, lying back against the armrest to pout at me passed her dreariness. "And let you do all the housework again? We agreed on splitting everything, housework included."

I watch her carefully before speaking, subtly absorbing the sight of her as I do. Normally she's prim and proper, haughty and detached when she's in her business suit and pencil skirt at work, but here she's a doting princess in her own shabby castle, messy hair splayed like vines creeping down over the pale skin laid bare by her loose nightgown. If I could paint, I would capture this moment forever, but if I did that every time I find myself admiring her, I'd have filled the walls in them till I buried the wallpaper.

"I still don't think that's fair. You're the boss, the CEO. You've got enough to do at the office!" My mouth argues. "Look, Weiss, I'm here to _share _your burdens, but I can't do that if you keep trying to shoulder your stress in and out of home like they're two separate things just cause they're in different places!"

She manages to sigh dramatically despite her yawning. "Are we really having this argument again?" Her heart isn't in it, really, eying me lopsidedly passed her bangs.

"Unless you settle on a compromise, babe, I'm not budging."

She ruminates while I work, and as soon as the meat is ready and in the fridge. The room is suddenly dark. I don't know how but it doesn't matter.

I don't see her when she speaks, and I swear there is no silhouette of her on the sofa. "Fine," she whispers closely to my ear. "Then let me sing for you, at least."

I hear the chittering of mandibles as she sings to me. Her hands slip over my chest from behind, and I feel a heat boiling inside of me. A different warmth blossoms over my back when I feel her there.

_There is a Moth on the mountain, and her song is my serenade._

❊( )❊

It is a sixteenth of November here on Mountain Glenn. The city is not as old as its sister city, Vale, but it has endured for over fifty years – beyond its predicted scope of only ten. However, there is talk of it collapsing under its own weight in time now, crime and corruption loosening the metaphorical soil, but it will not be in my life time. My children might suffer it… and yet I cannot bring myself to comprehend that.

Flashes in my mind recollect fragmented memories I am not certain are mine or if they are merely fabricated by some erstwhile dream or an errant, _looming _madness. Sometimes they are of a woman in my arms and a child in hers. Sometimes I'm staring at a stage in a darkened room, watching some high school play and I can _feel _my anticipation as I wait for my daughter to come out and sing.

Often times the images are faint, but the _sensations _are vivid, even if no image accompanies them. I remember warmth, love, a wet kiss on the cheek, a dirty diaper, a picture frame cutting my thumb as I haphazardly fit a diploma into it, dried paint hardening over my wrist as I repaint a bedroom once belonging to my now adult son, refurbished for my grandson instead…

Children pass me by as I wander the city streets, my dress shoes tapping against the pavement in a rhythm I use to distract from the rancor. But the children draw my eye as they crash into their guardians across the street. A collection of open arms and various affections drudges up those memories again.

I feel my wedding band over my ring finger when I see a couple hold their child's hands between them. I wonder if Weiss would one day be open to the idea but somehow the suggestion feels… foul,_ poisoned_. There is a semblance of joy but it is marred, drowned in a sea of dejection and apparent impossibility._ But_ _what does that even mean? She's isn't barren, we tested for this. We – !_

Tested? You'd only do that if you were trying for a child in the first place… She _did_ want children. I should have been a father. She should have been a mother. Why are we doing nothing? Why am I out on the streets and not being _with _her at this very moment? … Doesn't work stop at five? Why am I dress for work but not actually _at _work?

Where even am I?

Nothing makes sense.

I have memories of a different life but I've only ever had the one.

I stare at my watch and eye the tiny filigree minute hand tick passed twelve and drag the hour hand to four. I am painfully aware of every minute, every hour, every day, as if I am stalked by some inevitability. And I dread it. I fear its approach like a coming a storm where I am stranded, watching the skies for what will certainly come. What cannot be halted.

I hear ticking of the clock, the gears turning loudly, louder than anything else. Each tick thrums like a war drum in my left ear – thump, thump, thumping_ – _until I hear it beat instead. _Is that my heart?_

Coming to my senses I find myself turned around somewhere in the city, brutalist structures spire across what seems like a mile of city blocks in every direction. Each one strangely shaped and titanic as they dominate the landscape, but none like the tallest one in the distance. It is monolithic, like a slab of black concrete that towered so high that its top vanishes in the clouds above.

I feel a great fear resonating from it, and a deep menace thrumming from its static yet _pulsating _form.

My feet turn and run, but I hear nothing. As if now _both_ my ears are deaf. Not even the tapping of my own shoes can be heard. As I filter into the alleys and through the streets, the world stays eerily muted no matter how far away I get. Maybe it isn't the monolith's doing.

When I stop I see unmoving cars in open roads, walking pedestrians still as statues, and birds frozen midflight. I wander at an even pace, waiting for something to make sense again.

I hear a door open.

I turn to find an apartment building with an open door up some steps, wind slapping against the door so it repeatedly smacks against the cement railing that wings it.

Entering without a second thought, drawn by the only sound I can hear.

I am in the presence of a curio shop. Jars filled with small creatures frozen in amber line some shelves next to antique weapons and items, all metal rusted over but etched with strange runes.

One jar has an eyeball that predictably stares at me.

I glare at it and it looks at anywhere but me in a panic.

The staccato tap of the counter presents a hooded old woman by a register. I approach when she seems to stare at me underneath her hood.

I stop at the counter and cannot help but seat myself, but there's no chair, right?

I sit on a black recliner. The one from mine and Weiss's living room.

"You broke the rules, boy," the woman asks.

"I know. I wanted to. I'd do it again, even," my mouth says for me. I feel a rush of panic that quickly dies when I realize just how familiar this all is.

"Couldn't spend another day without her?"

"I don't think I could take another hundred years loving someone before suddenly losing them… and myself." _What am I saying? A hundred years? Does this have something to do with those memories that aren't mine?_

"Did I ever love any of them?" I find myself asking.

"You loved them all, boy. You couldn't bear to do anything _but_ that. Meet a beautiful woman and pour your heart out to her when she listens. And sometimes… well, every time, you manage to find one every hundred years to listen to you ramble at length." She types down at something from behind the counter, and I hear the familiar click of a cheap keyboard.

She eyes me curiously with the same single eye that has watched over me for almost a millennium. "Love is not destiny etched into the stars; it is a _choice,_" she says sternly. "And you chose to love each and every one of them. And when you lost them, you _chose_ to love again. You did not love one more than another. Love is not quantifiable. You'll waste your breath trying and you're wasting time _right now_ ruminating on it."

"I can't help it," I laugh as pleasant thoughts surge over me and send chills through my skin. "I couldn't swim, couldn't dance, my bravado was facsimile, and I'm over a thousand years old and I'm still afraid of drowning in the tub! And yet… Neon walked me by the docks so I could focus on her and not the sea, Ruby took me to prom and made a fool of herself with me on the dance floor, and Yang let me take the lead and eased me into every step to pleasuring her."

"And Weiss?" she asked.

"She sang to me as I drowned, keeping me at ease even as the water flooded my throat, my ears, my head…"

"She was not the one who pulled you out of that ocean."

"She might as well have," I countered. "I remember drowning all the time, and she's always there when no one else can be. Even if I can't see her. Even when I can't appreciate what she does… she _chose_ to help me even when I went to love another woman. Even when I forgot all about her and she watched me from that mountain."

The woman sighed, her hooded head resting one her pale, sharp hand. "And all it took was some tears and a kiss to get you to give all of that up?" She tapped a key on her keyboard with emphasis and a printer off to the side started grating.

She gestured to it and I did as she wanted. There were two images clung to one corner of some photo paper. They were pictures of two women. One a blonde monkey faunus with more abs than I was certain I'd ever get, and the other was a dark-skinned little woman with a blue military uniform and a matching beret. "Who are they?"

She waved off, bored. "The other two women you were supposed to meet. I don't know their names and I never will, so don't bother."

I look between her and the photos. "Are you… disappointed?"

"Bored, really," she said. "Had you stuck to the rules you could have lived out your unending life with so much more love… A hundred years for every woman and one night with _her_ by the end. Instead you opt to live with her for what remains of her life so she doesn't have to watch. A snap decision on one of the few nights you're conscious of her. Her kind doesn't live for very long, you know? When she is gone, there will be an eternity of nothing and no one. You'll never be able to love again."

Before I can answer, an elevator dings. The front door is gone. The familiar metallic walls of my apartment elevator are there instead.

"You have a dinner party and you're a minute late."

My watch starts ticking again. It's a minute passed four.

I step passed the metallic doors. Weiss is waiting for me.

"What will you do when this is all over?" the old woman asks.

I pinch my ring and smile. "Remember."

❊( )❊

November is nearly over.

It's morning, just before sunrise, and I'm sitting by a window as the world outside frosts over with Winter. Hot cocoa is in my hands, and sitting on a coaster across the table is a snowflake-emblazoned mug of hot coffee. I hate coffee, the smell especially, but I endure it for her.

Weiss enters, sitting beside me and thanking me for the mug.

I smile silently.

Her hands clutch the sides of the mug, feeling it cool her fingers before she takes it to her delicate lips. "So, we should actually start planning for Christmas," she says. "I think we've held it off long enough."

_Why have I been holding this off? _"I don't know… a stupid part of me feels like it's pointless."

She quirks a brow but doesn't jump to conclusions. "Okay, why?"

_Cause tomorrow it won't matter, _my mouth tries to say. I don't let it.

"Guess I'm just too relaxed," I say instead. "Don't mind me. I know we still have to figure out if we're seeing your parents, mine, or… neither."

She doesn't meet my gaze, eying the steam brimming off the top of her mug. "Jacques has already requested our RSVPs…"

I shrug nonchalantly. "We can still say no."

"You're telling me to snub the most powerful man in Atlas?"

"When you start acknowledging that he's your father, maybe then I'll consider him worthy of your company."

Her gloominess dies as she laughs, pulling color and mirth back into that smile of hers. "This sounds all turned around."

"Hey, you're barely his daughter at this point but you're _definitely _my wife. I'll marry you a second time just to rub it in."

She reaches for my hand and I clutch hers with mine. She takes the time to watch the snow so her blush dies down. I'm sure the cascading winters are a sight to see, but I watch her instead, etching the memory of her bemused little smile into my mind.

She notices me. "What are you looking at?"

"I just wanna remember this forever."

"You won't have to. We can have this every day, you know?"

Some part of me, lingering at the back of my mind, tells me that it's impossible. I ignore it. "Yeah… Don't mind me. I'm just being silly."

A rush of something desperate and grand broils over me and makes me stand. Determination fuels my steps and my tired arms as I walk over to Weiss and lift her bridal style.

"Woah! Neptune…" She giggles. "What on earth are you doing?"

"We're staying in today."

"But-!"

"Nope!"

She rolls her eyes as I take her to bed, sparing no further protest. That morning she tasted like coffee. I loved it.

❊( )❊

Before midnight dawns, I watch her as she sleeps, clutching my chest and sighing contentedly with every stroke I glide down the back of her crystalline hair that shimmers in swathes in the moonlight. With my head pressed to hers, the heat of her breath tickles my lips before I kiss her. I can almost swear she kisses me back as sleep claims me…

I wake up in a valley shadowed by a temple atop a mountain.

❊( )❊

The valley is quiet as I wander along the dirt path, and I stare down at the dried river bank along the road, the hewn stone and weathered soil having swallowed what little eel grass that remained. I might have been grateful for the lack of noise had the plain flowers it fed not died in its absence.

I sigh and continue in the direction of the mountain.

Down the road is the eleven-hundred steps and guarding the torii gate at its foot is a single guard in his silken robes.

"Neptune!"

"Perry," I greet. "Where's Deery?"

"At home with the kids," he says, showing off his wedding band. "We got married in the hundred years you were gone."

_I've been gone a month_. "It's still been a hundred years?"

"Well, yeah! Of course it has. Just like every other time." He appraises me with concern. "Did… did something happen?"

"No, just… this one felt a little short is all."

He winces. "It wasn't boring, was it?"

"Oh, no," I chuckle. "You might even say it was some of the best fun I've ever had."

"Dad!" I turn to see teenage girl with the same silken robes as Perry, a pair of kamas at her waist and her mother's orange hair. "Oh! You must be Neptune. Father said you'd be around here any day now. Nice to meet you!"

Perry proudly rests his hands on her shoulders. "This is my eldest, Cherry."

My eye twitches at the name. "A pleasure."

"Was she pretty?" she asks, excitement brimming off her wide-eyed gaze.

"The prettiest," I say.

"Oh…" Her disappointment is palpable. _Did I say something wrong?_ "What about those other girls? Were they _less _pretty?"

Leave it to Perry to raise a girl with complicated questions. Luckily, I have experience with this. "Yup. They were the prettiest too."

"That can't be right."

"Well, you tell me. Do you have any sisters?"

"Yeah, three!"

_Wow, Perry, you've been busy. _"And who among them is the prettiest?"

"Uh… all of them. Oh! Okay. You got me there. Dad said to mess with you but I couldn't lie or else you'd figure it out."

I raise a brow a Perry. "Is that so?"

"How did you worm your way out of that?" he asks.

"I'm over a thousand years old and have likely had more kids and grandkids than you and your cousins will ever even see."

"And here I thought the Arcs were fertile…" he mumbles.

"The… who?"

"Don't ask." His grimace that doesn't quite reach his eyes is the only sign of his age. Untested and soft as he is.

Perry is old like me but he stays here on his post, living an uncomplicated life and marrying into the only woman he's ever known. Honestly, I suppose their initial hatred of each other only made things interesting.

I march up the steps ahead of them. "I'll go on ahead."

"Already?" I hear Perry whispering to his daughter for a moment he pipes up again. I slow my steps, trying to wait. "Hey, uh, Nep? You don't look so bad today."

"Uh… thanks?"

"No, no, I mean… You don't look like you're in pain."

"Oh, that's cause my brain –" I pivot but my words die as my jaw goes slack at the horizon. "What the fuck is that?"

Far off into the distance, miles and miles away, beyond the valley at the mountain range that hugs it, just in the shadow of where the setting sun vanishes between the peaks, is the same titanic monolith I saw on Mountain Glenn.

It looms with a dark haze in the distance, yet again spired high into the clouds, vanishing there.

"I don't know," Perry says, "but it gets closer every year."

"Why didn't you mention it!?"

I want to punch him when he quirks a brow at_ me_. "You're only in the valley one day every hundred years. It didn't seem like this kind of stuff concerned you since you'll be gone in the morning."

"That isn't the point!" I pinch the bridge of my nose. "Okay, did you go and see it up close?"

"I did… _kind of_. It's sitting in the next valley over, just beyond mountain rang. I tried to get a good look at it but… it has tendency to stay in your periphery. Like it won't let you focus on it."

"Dad, that sounds scary."

Perry comforts his daughter and I start my climb again, eying the monolith.

"Oh, wait!" Perry clutches a white bundle of cloth and tosses it at me. I catch it and untie the knot, revealing a golden pin depicting a ship in water with a lighthouse in the background.

"What's this?" I ask.

"You don't remember? I found it in your old barn house in the other valley. Thought I'd give it a look-see before coming back. You didn't come here as a farmer, Neptune. You were a _sailor_. Had that pinned to your hat when we first met. You had that ear infection then, right?"

"Uh… yeah, but… didn't I build my farm here in _this _valley?"

"Did you?"

"He did!" Cherry chimed. "I grew up playing in your old barn. It's gone now."

I stare again at the encroaching monolith and I feel that dread again… that fear of something inevitable looming in the distance. Only now it's not a metaphor.

❊( )❊

Halfway up the steps I expect to see that old demon woman again. Instead I find a fifteen-year-old girl swinging her legs over a pile of wood. She notices me instantly and stares… _around_ me? Her eyes don't exactly focus but when she approaches me, the sunlight folds over her face as if its flat, featureless. I realize that it's a mask.

"My, my, back so soon?" she asks. Her voice is unfamiliar. "No regrets, I hope?"

"None," I say sternly but my bravado slips away a moment later. I'm more curious than determined at the moment. "Who are you?"

She cackles mischievously like an old witch. "Don't recognize me?" Her hand glides over the mask's chin and she peels it off, revealing her single giant eye. "How about now?"

It is difficult to take the sight of her. It was the same woman but her skin is not pale, her nails are not sharp, she is not hunched, and I scarcely believe her because the only thing she shares with the old woman I know is the one eye, and that hardly means anything. "You look… different." I concede, however. It's strange but she is unlikely to be anyone else.

"Well, you've caught me before I had time to develop wrinkles again." She pulls at the skin of her cheek before letting go as it slaps back into place. "I have to reincarnate every time you start a cycle. Not all of us can maintain their youth for eternity, after all." She loops an arm over my shoulders and gestures down the steps, the silhouettes of the guards shifting about animatedly. "Not like Perry."

"Look at him," she continues. "He doesn't know what it's like to grow old. To have your body _fail _you as your senses slip away with the passing seasons. To be worse than blind; where you can see but understand nothing of what you behold. Instead he was a boy who grew into a man… and stopped. The worst he'll find is his daughter suddenly looking his age, and _her _son looking the same. A strange dinner that'll be."

I peel off her arm from my shoulder. She smiles smugly. "What about that building? He seems pretty concerned by it."

"Yes, curious thing, that." She pulls away and steps towards the forest that sleeves the mountain. "I wouldn't concern myself with it, if I were you. Hurry along now, you'll keep Miss Schnee waiting."

"Her name is Weiss."

"Oh, I don't mean the Moth, boy."

I don't ask her what she means. I don't want to trouble myself with deciphering any more cryptic happenings. "You didn't answer my question."

"Hm? And what was that one again?"

"Who are you?"

"Maria Calavera," she says as she blinks, and for a _moment_ I see two eyes and a normal human face. "I used to be a hunter here. Until the valley emptied up. Then _you _came along and made things… interesting."

"I only asked for your name."

She looks over her shoulder and chuckles. "You shouldn't keep stalling. The sun sets with you, after all, and I'd rather get a good night's sleep before this is all over."

❊( )❊

I watch the steps as I make my way to the top. My body feels like its aging, trailing its decaying skin down the slopes of the mountain, filtering into valley below to feed the lands I once cursed to be barren. Of course this is impossible, my body does not decay, it leaves nothing behind. My hair does not grow. Not in the valley. Not here where time stops and the sun is only a set piece, tracking my ascent, and the moon is a spotlight, service to Weiss's performance.

The last hundred steps are before me. I can feel the thousand steps before, and its weight is immeasurable. Each one is another year to my life and yet… here I stand at a hundred I did not live. I was out there only a month.

It makes sense that when I take the next – I am already at the top, as brief and fleeting as the one November with her that I traded another hundred years of love for.

The steps behind me are forgotten.

She is already singing when I find her at the temple, but it silences once she sees me walk the path. She emerges from the shadows of the temple and stands there, smiling at me from the porch.

"Do you remember our lives before November or the Christmas that came after?" she asks.

"No, I don't think I've lived it."

She nurses a wedding band on her ring finger. "Then let me tell you a story."

❊( )❊

I lived only in that November, but Weiss lived those hundred years in my stead.

It was no traditional proposal. We were working through our taxes in our living room when we got to talking and decided that things might be easier if we were married.

The wedding was sparse… but _lavish_. I had commissioned a suit to be tailored an entire year prior. She had a beautiful gown she had designed after three years of failed prototypes. The catering was one course, self-service, homemade and _delicious_. Our guests were few – only our closest – and were largely drunk by the end of the night. Yang still doesn't remember attending.

Our vows were choked in tears and caught on camera. Neither Ruby nor Jaune will tell us where the original copy is.

And Sun catches the bouquet.

Our lives after were left straddling the line between poverty and being okay enough to go on a date without worries. Her father would contact her years later and offer her a job in exchange for a mock wedding where the families can actually attend and he can maybe, _finally_, walk his daughter down the aisle instead of Winter.

Slowly they patch things up and I'm suddenly allowed to have a father-in-law. We go fishing. We're both bad at it. We get along.

She becomes my boss and we share no affection at work, only to disperse all our tension at home. Life is good and we spend most every Christmas in our apartment, and every New Year at the heart of Glenn where our friends have dragged us to celebrate.

No matter where I fall asleep, I always wake up in bed with her. Even when I pass out at a bar the night prior or start drooling on top of paperwork at the office.

She teaches me to dance so I don't embarrass myself at the reception. She masks my dwindling bravado by interrupting like an affectionate partner. She eases me into a tub so my fear of water vanishes in her warmth.

And by the time the story finishes, I realize that I'd been telling it.

❊( )❊

"Look at 'em down there," Qrow says glaring over the safety railing. "Soakin' up all our hard work and acting like we aren't on the razor's edge of death."

Below us is a sea of neon colors, flashing off the crowds of people that have flooded the city floor in dancing, sweaty bodies.

I know he isn't actually mad at the civies. He just misses his wife and honestly, so do I. I swirl my virgin cuba libre and down it. "Winter hasn't been putting out lately, huh?"

Qrow snarls. "She's been busy with the runway this week… Hasn't been home."

"You'd probably see her more often if you just took up her offer. You're already one of the better looking guys on the payroll. I'm sure Coco would love to have you in one of her suits, even _if_ you stain a few."

He pauses, letting the idea simmer but he can't help but maintain that viper's glare of his. He sighs. "Can't. Wish I could but some of the newer huntsmen have taken more to the acting than their training. If we get another newbie killed in the next invasion just as they're starring in their new show, morale's gonna take a hit and it's gonna be on _me._"

"It's everyone's burden, Qrow. If we start pointing fingers then we _all_ go down. You know that."

"Don't remind me. I know the Corps is a den of sweethearts, Nep, but it doesn't ease the guilt. Hell, sometimes it makes it worse." He swirls his whiskey and, with more willpower than I've ever seen him wield, gently puts it away at only half full. "I know these kids by name now. City's too small to do otherwise, and losing another one… shit, if you don't tell me I failed them, then I will. Someone's got to."

Winter crashes into his back, pushing him into the railing, her sequin dress twinkling like a silver galaxy. "Sounds like someone needs a pick-me-up."

He lightens up instantly when she snakes her arms up his chest from behind. "Winter?" he asks.

"Hm…" she hums before he spins himself around and their noses are touching. "I wanted to catch you in a good mood but I think a dance will perk you up first before I give you the good news. So… care to dance?"

"I… I don't know what to say."

"Try _yes_," I say.

Qrow is normally much more stoic, especially when he's largely sober, but Winter does things to that sailor-mouth of his. "Uh… yes." He fumbles and she loves it, Winter's alluring smile tugging him as much as her hand does.

Weiss is beside me suddenly, her own drink in her hand. She opted for the same as mine. "I'll admit, seeing my sister like this still takes some… _adjustment._"

I peck her on the cheek. "How'd it go?"

She pouts for a moment before hiding behind her glass of soda. "It depends on who you ask. Winter is officially putting up an academy." The pout gets stronger but by now it's a wince and she won't meet my eyes. "Coco approved her resignation but I have to fill in for her so they don't have to recruit someone else for the season's runway lineup."

"So Qrow gets to see his wife more often but I get to see mine less?"

"H-hey! I didn't…! I didn't have a choice…"

"Hey, woah! It's okay, Snow Angel, look at me." I hold up her chin and I kiss her. We pull away and she's embarrassed but instead of retreating, her forehead meets mine. "It isn't like you're as busy as Winter. I still get to see you every night." My smile doesn't match my eyes when I realize that she has to work late tonight. "We'll see each other tomorrow night. I'll make you dinner."

"I cancelled tonight's meetings."

"What?"

She squeezes my lapels, her grip haunted by something fearful. "You're on The Front tomorrow," she says quietly. "I read Ruby's report. There's more Grimm flooding into Eden than there has been in thirteen years! If you tell me we're having dinner tomorrow, I'll get my hopes up…" She stifles tears and swallows more that edges from her throat as she chokes.

So, I pull her in and hold her tight. "No need for hope. It's a guarantee. It's never that I _might_ see you again, it's that I always _will_. Trust me to come back to you every time, alright?" I make it a rule to keep my promises, just so I can make this one every time she's afraid.

"You're an idiot…" she says, slipping her drink next to mine on the table before she loops her arms around my neck. I wipe away her tears with the handkerchief in my breast pocket and she manages to smile. "Fine, then. It's a date."

❊( )❊

The City of Eden has two-tier defensive walls that hold off the Grimm in an invasion, but there's a breaching point that we use to force Grimm into a funnel. It's a narrow passage passed the first tier into an advantageous battleground before the second. This passage is what we call The Front.

When the Grimm find their way into the valley, the huntsmen go on a rotation from their lives as entertainers to defend the city here. The rest, however, don't actually get to take a break. They're on reserve, waiting to fill the empty spaces. Since rookies need combat experience, we send them in as a fourth of our force.

Luckily none of them died this time.

I haul Perry to his feet from his faceplant into the mud. He groans. "I hate that we need the loose soil…"

"Hey, you're lucky the ursa are too heavy to climb a muddy slope. They nearly got you back there."

"Slope didn't stop the griffin…"

"That's why _I _got your back when _it _doesn't." The rifle under my one arm charges with energy for emphasis.

"Woah, hey, keep that away from me! You'll electrocute the mud!"

"It's mud, not water. That's not how that works."

"Oh, it doesn't?"

"It doesn't. Trust me, I know what is and isn't conductive." I put my weapon away anyway, strapping it to my back.

"Why'd you call that thing Tri-Hard anyway?"

I groan, embarrassed. "I was a kid, okay? I thought it was cool and the name kinda… grew on me."

As Perry laughed at my expense, a camera drone floated by taking a quick snapshot of us. Perry tried to reach out for it dashed back and zoomed away. "Those drones were all over the place when we were fighting. Are they live?" he asked.

"If you mean the broadcast, no. They used to but it only took one injury caught on camera for the Corps to realize that we'd need to edit the footage to get best results without traumatizing anyone."

"Oh? Any footage of anyone dying?"

I know it's his curiosity and not his outright disrespect talking so I choose not to point that out. "We delete those. No one's allowed to watch them, even for educational purposes."

After half an hour walking back to the gate, we see the drones collectively float back. The Front is used to fill broadcast time for about a month after an invasion so huntsmen can take a break for a while. Looking over the fields of wounded huntsmen sports proof of its necessity. Many are dragging themselves up the muddy slopes and over the battlements. Others are huddled together in solace, comfort, sometimes with one of them in tears from either mourning, relief, or just settling fear.

Huntsmen like myself aren't as shaken, though. We're used to it by now. Even our mourning is settled privately, it'd be for the best anyway. They we consider ourselves luckily that none of that is necessary today.

Up ahead I spot golden locks of our two toughest front liners, Yang and Jaune. They're both dance instructors and little else. Normally huntsmen take more public roles as entertainers but when you are regular shield walls when the barricades come down, you're better off spending your time doing more workouts than entertaining.

Between them is Jaune's wife, Pyrrha, one of our popstars, and our only scout, Ruby Rose.

A part of me wants to walk up to her but I'm covered in mud. I always have the urge to thank her every time we're at The Front. Every huntsman is expected to at least be an actor or actress additionally, but not her. Ruby's the only pure huntress, and is also the only reason why we don't have other scouts. She's always outside of the valley, always sending in reports of Grimm activity, and she absolutely refuses to let anyone tag along. They'll only slow her down, and it isn't like anyone could match her speed anyhow.

She's also my wife's best friend.

From a distance, she spots me, my blue hair revealing me despite the mud. She waves heartily and beckons but I shake my head and gesture at the all of me.

"Dinner tonight then!" she shouts, "Oscar's cooking my favorite!" Her companions flinch, because Oscar has been trying to propose in private but she keeps dragging people along. It isn't that she's dense, she's too smart for that, especially in her late twenties. No, she's just afraid of it. I don't know why, not that its any of my business.

"I have plans!" I say aloud. "Maybe next time!"

Pyrrha, being the only one behind Ruby, manages a relieved sigh and mouths a '_thank you_' before I walk off.

I don't notice.

"Neptune?" Perry asks. "What are you staring at?"

"Do you see it?"

I'm staring over the great inner wall that lines the city, and from here you're not supposed to be able to see the city at all with the walls so high. And yet…

Perry doesn't see it. Of course he doesn't. No one else can. Not here.

The great monolith that pierces the clouds looms in the distance as the only spire that conquers the sky, even in the company of walls that rival mountains. I fear it. Fear its inevitability even if I don't know why or how.

"I don't see anything," Perry says. "Is this some kind of trick? Are you messing with me?"

"No, no, I must've been seeing things."

He doesn't accept my excuses but can do nothing about them. He keeps quiet and I carry on into the shadow of the great wall.

❊( )❊

Fireworks flash over the night sky over the rancor of a distant New Year's countdown as I'm lying on my sofa with Weiss in my arms. I take comfort in the way she tries to get into a more comfortable position in her sleep, and the way she snarls in irritation at something in her dreams. Her breath tickles the skin of my chest and her hair clings to my arm with sweat. Normally this would comfort me – an intimate yet carnal moment like this – but it's the edge of December already and the rapid winds have torn away the snow, and I can only feel… melancholy.

Beyond my window is the cityscape alight with cheer, merriment, but in the center of it all is that _monolith_, a grim omen of things to come, of what approaches. Yet fear is the last thing on my mind.

I am rueful, as if I am about to leave so many things behind. As if I am about to lose all that I hold dear.

I peel myself away and trudge naked towards the window, the flashing of the colored lights blooming across my damp skin, and I am mesmerized at the sensations prodding at my skull and raking shivers down my flesh. My breath hitches and for a single, terrifying moment as the fireworks freeze in place like falling stars painted against a dark canvas.

Maria comes to mind, hoping that she's stopped time again to give me solace, but there is none. I do not feel her presence nor hear her cackle. Instead I hear chittering, mandibles clicking softly, and the sore stretch of thin, glassy wings.

Weiss clings to my arm, her silken carapace skin and fluffed neck pressing softly, offering frail comforts amidst her emanating grief. I can feel her anxiety as she tightens her grip, trying to find some of that comfort for herself.

"Neptune?" she whispers. "Neptune…" She gasps, heart and throat straining as words fail her and all she can do is whimper.

I feel my heart sinking into my stomach as I choke, and I feel fury boiling into me; at myself, at the world. Because what I have I cannot give to her. My endless years, my eternity on this gods-forsaken earth, doomed to ever be mine and mine alone. Here, where my wishes fall on deaf ears to an different sky as I beg, pray, _plead, _that I might give it all to her.

My hand finds hers and as my head falls to her shoulder, my tears and my staccato gasps and breaths burying themselves into her neck as I find the composure to say, "I will miss you _every day _until the sun grows cold."

I feel her mandible against my cheek and I slip between them to find her lips, and I pour my heart out along with the eternity I'll spend wishing she'd be there for it all.

"What's wrong?" my wife asks when I pull away.

"I… I don't remember," I say as I wipe a tear off my cheek.

She pouts but I can tell she's more worried than she is anything else. "Don't scare me like that…"

"I'm sorry." I laugh it off but I can't fight the heaviness in my chest.

"You're forgiven," she says, smiling, before she buries her heated cheeks against mine. "Hey, I love you."

"I love…" _a myriad of faces flash before my eyes, before they settle on her,_ "…all of you."

_I'll miss you all. I'm so sorry._

I realize I'm mourning but can't say why, or how. Cause there is no explanation that sums it with any adequacy. I just am. And it hurts. Hurts enough to swallow me whole.

_THREE!_

I hear the countdown of the crowds that flood the city.

_TWO!_

I hear her humming against my chest.

_ONE!_

And I hear the song I'll never hear again.

"Happy New Year, Neptune."

"Happy Birthday, Weiss."

❊( )❊

I ply through an errant haze as I weed my consciousness out of it, plucking pieces of myself as I slowly see color, hear the sounds of the whistling wind, and feel strength in my arms and in the reverberation of my feet as it takes to the road of the valley once more.

The familiarity is jarring, out of place. As if my sense of sameness is… _wrong _somehow but I don't quite trust my instincts. No, rather, I don't _want _to trust my instincts.

Beside me is the dried riverbed. I follow it along where I expect to find the same plain but dead flowers as before. I'm surprised to find that there's a single living one bending in the wind. I pluck it carefully and marvel at its quiet frailty, a meekness that wards off passersby, where only I can see it for what it is, where I might covet in silence.

I slip it into my pocket.

The torii gate peeks over from the forest that sidles the road with the river, and Perry is there lying back against the steps, sleeping. The lazy bum.

I shake my head and roll my eyes but something looms in my periphery. It's through the treeline that I see something behind them, but my eyes draw upward and I see it again… the monolith spired into the sky.

My feet carry me down the road towards Perry but my eyes draw to the monolith still, almost commanding my attention. I force myself away but my neck turns still.

I see it for what it is, a massive brutalist building, slate black and concrete, and passed its glass doors I can see a flair of orange hair and a pink bow manning the reception before my eyes unfocus and the building becomes a blur in my mind.

I can't focus on it anymore as it seems to remove its own presence from my mind, but not until I know its two names: Ward Ten and Ward Twelve, the TERMINAL and the CLOCKTOWER. It asks that I remember it, but does not demand.

Then, somehow, it tells me to go.

So I do, taking Perry's discarded billhook halberd with me as I race up the steps. I feel my own weight crash over the concrete as the sun descends behind me. My heart hitches in my throat, thrumming as I gulp down breaths and ignore the aching that harrows my body, adrenaline trebling till I'm numb.

Along the way I hear Maria calling out to me, but I push passed and upwards still. Her voice is distant, stacked at the back of my mind as I hear Weiss singing earlier than she ought.

And somehow I feel myself leaping off the thousandth step, and I'm at the last in an instant.

The sun is down and the moon cradles the stars, but there is no song. The silence rings in my ears, deep enough that I can swear I feel my own blood pumping my veins.

At the temple there are two people in suits, a man with an open collar and a woman without her suit jacket. They're armed. They spot me but don't raise their weapons. Somehow I don't feel as if I should fear them.

The weapon slips from my fingers.

I am suddenly aware of the night sky. The sun sets with me, but the moon never peaks over the garden until I find her.

"Neptune," Maria says behind me, "you can't do this. She'll die if you go any further. Every step is another piece of her short, little life chipped away."

I feel my mouth move but I am with it. This distant part of me that remembers things that I don't, finally finds me again. And I know now, I remember…

"If I turn away, she stays in this moment forever. Frozen in time. Trapped. But I can't leave her stagnating. It would be selfish of me to preserve her here just so I can find comfort in the fact that she'll still be alive in my mind if I don't… _move on_." I turn to Maria and I'm surprised to find her worried for me. "I have to accept this for what it is."

The pair in black step out of my way as I climb the porch and enter the garden.

Weiss is lying in the flowerbed; a shaking finger rises to greet me along with a smile the edges her lip beneath her tired but watering eyes. I kneel beside her and wipe her tears and kiss her forehead, then her lips.

She is too weak to form words, and I have none that I haven't already said.

So instead I lay my head to her chest, smiling up at her until she closes her eyes. Under the moonlight she is still the center, the performer at her stage, but the song does not pass her lips but thrums in her chest, as her heart beats… beats…. beats… until it does no more.

❊( )❊

When she is gone, I lie in the flower bed as a haze recollects in my mind. I think, for a moment, that there is hope in another life, but the garden still has a little river… and its overflowing.

The rush of water fills my lungs and clogs my only functioning ear until it deafens, noises muffling beneath a barricade of water. I choke as tears well from my eyes as all of me is somehow crushed by the weight of the ocean.

Blurs of people rushing to my aid are muddled by the water coating my eyes, as if I am staring at the water's surface above as I'm drowning a mile deep.

They say that when I died that time, so did the valley.

The mountain decays around me. The trees are rushed by a millennium of suffocated winds, seasons passing in a blink of an eye: burning, cooling, freezing, blooming, until the valley is dust and the mountain is bare, till the creatures die, and the Moth's song wains in the wind like the last vestige of anything, an ode to its end gasped by the winds.

All that is left is the temple: her stage. For that is our tombstone. For the valley, me, and the Moth.

_There was once a Moth on this mountain. She serenaded the valley under the pale chrysalis of the moon and left me her captive audience, marveling at her song as she soothed my pains and quieted my fears. Ad it was such that our love came in equal measure, sacrificing the valley frozen in time, to breathe life into it once more._

_With the mountain made bare, it settles waterbeds for crops as it is carved into farmlands whilst the valley it shadows is tilled with bountiful harvests over a land that was once barren but was weathered to harbor it once more._

[░▒▓║█║▓▒░]

"Warden! Uh… Mr. Merlot!?" Lisa Lavender called from down the hall.

"Ah, Dr. Lavender," Merlot greeted, turning to her. "I hope you have my report."

"Yes, sir."

He took the offered clipboard in her hands and flit through the papers and scanned the highlights. He settled on some photos of a valley and some microscopic photos of plant life. One photo is that of the valley filled with dense forests, another is one where it is barren – the tail end of rushing winter snow passing over it as the soft heat of summer followed quickly after – and finally one of farmlands occupying the space labeled 'three months later.'

"What can you tell me of the valley?" he asked.

"We tested the plant life and found traces of salt water on everything. As if an ocean passed over it for long enough to sink into the soil, but they didn't die. There was time anomaly, apparently, keeping them from wilting. We brought in researchers from CLOCKTOWER to quickly acquire samples before the rapidly passing seasons tore it apart."

"What did they find?"

"Not much. Something was channeling the anomaly through the temple at the top of the mountain but it's gone now."

"That moth woman, perhaps?"

"We can't say. By the time the valley let us through she was already dead."

Merlot stopped. "The valley was resisting us?"

"I think it feared us," she said. "Our forced entry through TERMINAL might have come off as rather aggressive instead of desperate."

"Hm…" He went over the files again as he continued down the cold, empty hallway. "What of our new subject?"

Lisa looked away. She was apprehensive. "As far as we can tell, Neptune might have been the source of the saltwater. We found a pin on his person for an old cruise ship…"

He watched her carefully. "For _The Eden_?" he guessed.

"Yes, sir. The very same."

Merlot sighed with relief. Excitement broiled in his old bones but he would not get ahead of himself. "So it's him, then? The same sailor who washed up on Mistral, the businessman at Mountain Glenn, the dead man at the carnival, and the old huntsman on Eden. All of them, the same person in different worlds."

"We've tested his remains with his hair samples on The Scale in CATHEDRAL and the Almost Reflection in MADHOUSE. Their temperament matches perfectly, as does their reflection; all of the same man in our cell."

He didn't trust those Anomalies as much as he could have, but there were research teams in Ward Nine who could do more biological testing. "Have you tested his DNA?"

She blinked at him. "With the DNA Sequencing Machine? Uh, sir, that _clones _people. It doesn't identify them."

"Oh… Well, I can hardly be faulted for it. It isn't like it's in _my _Ward." He huffed. "Finger print matching?" he asked hopefully.

"That _changes_ identities… sir."

He bore a deep frown that clawed down his old face, revealing wrinkles he hoped his white facial hair could mask. "Very well, I'll trust in our present findings. Where is the file on him?"

Lisa held out a hand to her side just as someone whizzed in a blur, leaving another clipboard in her hand. "Thank you, Russel," she said as she opened the file. "Neptune Vasilias. Varied surnames over his other instances include: Schnee, Arc, Branwen, and Gale. Functionally immortal, the cause of which is not yet identified. Twenty-six in appearance, perhaps over a millennium in reality. Blue hair, _natural_ – if you'd believe it. Combat experience: potentially adequate but is unobserved in his current state. Resilience: yet to be determined."

"He was a Vasilias in all bit one of our samples."

"They're speculative, sir. We have a few other instances of him that are likely but are not certain. Neptune has been observed climbing the mountain a total of twelve times. We suspect he has lived at least that many lives outside of the valley."

"Can we not confirm it with him directly?"

"He is uncooperative." She doubled back. The wording might have been poor. "Well, more _unresponsive_, really. He seems to be in a state of shock."

"Shame. I don't suppose the good doctor from Ward Six can cure him?"

She shook her head. "Caduceus can only heal those who have formed a bond with him. If Neptune will not speak, let alone bond, it would be pointless."

He didn't know where to go from here. Forcing Neptune to relay his past would go against the Wards' ethics and could reflect poorly on him as a Warden. He leafed through the pages on his clipboard further in the hope of anything useful. He came upon a still image of a woman with moth-like features lying in a bed of chickweed flowers.

"Is this…?" he trailed off, looking to Lisa.

"The Moth. She was identified as such by a temple guard and accounts from local villages."

"But does she have a name?"

"If she did, we wouldn't know it. Neither Agents Rose nor Wukong could procure it. We believe Ms. Calavera might have known but she continues to elude us."

"I might fathom a guess… Tell me, Dr. Lavender, do you know of Ward Twelve's most valuable asset?"

"I don't have clearance there, sir. All the temporal anomalies interfere with my broadcasting ability. I was assigned to this task solely by my association with Neptune at the orphanage."

"Regardless, we have a Subject there that might have him open up to us."

She stiffened. "If I may, _Warden_, I hope this isn't some trickery."

He smiled, his wrinkles upturning with him. "I'm above such things, Doctor. Besides, I believe this might be a pleasant instance of fate at hand."

[░▒▓║█║▓▒░]

There was a large room in Ward Twelve where a bungalow with glass walls and glass doors sat underneath an artificial skylight where it trickled rays into the home's open center where a simple garden grew.

Neptune, haunted still by a thousand years of too much and left with too little, tended to it as his mind wandered to erstwhile places, of lives long passed and many more mostly forgotten.

Her song still rung in his ear.

With his spade set aside and his gloves discarded, he fell back into the garden. The chickweed flowers did not bend but held him aloft. He was weightless as he laid across the delicate buds, their petals shifting beneath him like a gentle caress.

A klaxon blared once, pulling him from his stupor.

Passed the blurry glass walls was a woman in a strapless white Victorian dress under a lace bolero.

She walked with a propriety that was all at once familiar and alien. A gentle yet firm hand rapped against his glass door before she stood still and proper, hands and knees clutched together.

He stood and with a hesitant first step, left the garden with a growing haste. He felt as if he was being beckoned by something greater than a single woman by his door, tugged along by an invisible serenade.

Through the door her face was indecipherable but he fathomed a guess even if it seemed impossible at the time.

When he opened the door, she was there, and all his sorrows melted. "Weiss?" he asked.

Delicate lashes blinked as she stood aback, her lips quivering at a name she felt she shouldn't have known but did. She muttered it at first and felt it familiar out her throat, against her lips, over her ears. "Neptune?" It came out once more, clearly this time.

His breath caught. He made to embrace her but she raised her hands defensively in fear. He stopped.

"I… I don't know how I know you but please don't get familiar with me," she said.

"Sorry, you looked somebody I knew. I guess I got confused."

"I see. That's why the Warden sent me over," she said, nodding. "Very well. If I resemble someone you knew then perhaps it might ease your recovery were we to associate."

"My recovery?"

"You are in pain, aren't you?"

He laughed. "Is that what they said?"

Her face scrunched in confusion. "No… I… they didn't say that. They only told me to speak to the Subject here. I just… _knew_."

"Oh."

"Did you know me before?"

"I don't think so," he deflected.

She stepped up to him, glaring. "Don't lie to me," she said sternly.

"I may have known someone like you."

She eyed the garden behind him passed the opened glass doors and saw the healthy bed of chickweeds. Drawing her own conclusions, she stepped back to give him room as she summoned a breath. "I'm assuming she loved chickweeds?"

"She did," he said, reminiscing. "They're plain, _normal_. She liked them for that."

"Well, I _don't_." His heart stopped. "I am more inclined to white roses. They are… _rarer_, elusively beautiful." She stepped passed him and into his home. His eyes followed her as she watched the garden and felt something inside of her.

She pivoted around with a single chickweed flower in her hands against her chest, over her heart. "But it does not mean I dislike them."

"Where did you get that?"

"Your pocket," she pointed out.

"I don't have any pockets."

Examining his green overalls, she found that he indeed had no pockets. She shrugged. "Well, I suppose it isn't the _strangest_ thing that's happened to me here."

She took a breath and steeled herself before him, eyes sharp and commanding. "Allow me to make things clear: I am not her, whoever she was that you cared for. I am someone else, however familiar I might be but… the it is quite lonely here and I would not be opposed to finding myself in better, more _frequent,_ company."

A part of him believed that this could not have been the Weiss he remembered. There was a standoffishness that he wasn't quite used to but it was undeniably her in most places. Yet she was a stranger still, a different version of the woman he _loved_ but she was different nonetheless. "You're being pretty honest with a stranger here," he said.

Her eyes met his with a quiet sadness. "But you aren't a stranger, are you? Somehow I know you and you clearly know me. So I will take things as they are and if you are willing to cooperate, we may continue seeing each other."

He laughed at the absurdity of it all. "You make it sound like a business transaction."

"Is that different?" she asked.

"It is."

"Good." She smiled and held out a hand. "I will meet you here every weekday at noon. We may have lunch. I am an excellent cook."

"And the weekends?" he asked, hopeful.

"You may see me at mine. I live on the highest floor of the Ward. The staff can guide you." Heat crept into her cheeks. "Understand, however, that this is _not_ a romantic invitation."

"Oh?" He smiled mischievously. "And what do I do to change that?" He physically resisted the urge to call her by her pet name.

"Ingratiate me," she said simply with a smile of her own. "I will not deny that I feel like I already know you, but we've not even a first date. I am _not _an easy woman."

"I didn't think you were." He shook her hand but she did not let go.

Weiss stared at the floor with her eyes clenched shut. He called her name and she felt his breath tickle the top of her head. With an exhale, she met his eyes, grabbed his cheek with her other hand, and kissed him. She felt him gasp as his other hand found her waist and trailed up her back.

Red blossomed over her as he blinked down at the captivating sight beneath him.

Her eyes shut. The sound of gears turning stopped in her mind before they turned in reverse. For a moment once more she tasted him against her lips before she opened them again. He didn't look shocked. Good. She was afraid she might have failed turning back time in because of her embarrassment.

"Weiss?" he asked. "You're blushing."

"I know. Please forget it."

With another handshake she walked out of the room, never daring to look back for fear of letting him see her shortness of breath the rumbling in her chest against a quickened heart. Even as memories of him that should not be hers sank into place, aligning with the man in her dreams.

And as she trudged down the halls of the Ward, she pinched a wedding band that was not there, felt the warmth of his hand under a mandible she did not have, and tasted a kiss that was everything she remembered it to be.

[░▒▓║█║▓▒░]

It was the end of December when he laid on Weiss's lap, listening to her sing operatic beneath the artificial sun hung over their garden. There are white roses now too, decorating the rim of it, and a tree the staff managed to get grown in under a day.

It was all _different_ now but it didn't need to be exactly the same.

What he had was enough. More than enough really. Even if Weiss was different, even if she only remembered some of the things they did together. It felt him with a bevy of stories to tell, though, and she was scarce to believe that all their love stories were real and in another life.

He had questions still. Who pulled him from the depths of the ocean? How did he find the valley? Who made him immortal? But those questions could wait. Perhaps they would come in time or… not at all, made no difference to him.

The ocean in his mind quieted – felt himself surfacing from it. All that remained was her song and – as he pressed his ear to her belly – the first spritely kick of their firstborn.

THREE!

The rancor from the staff resonated against the cement walls outside.

TWO!

She giggles at another kick and he's laughing with her.

ONE!

And gives up on singing the song that he'll just ask her to sing again.

"Happy New Year, Neptune."

"Happy Birthday, Weiss."


End file.
